Accurate field data can be used to assess ecosystem services from trees and to improve urban forest management, yet little is known about the optimization of field data collection in the urban environment. Various field and Geographic Information System (GIS) tests were performed to help understand how time costs and precision of tree population estimates change with varying plot and sample siz...

Studying on spatial and temporal variation in soil organic carbon (SOC) is of great importance because of global environmental concerns. Tillage-induced soil erosion is one of the major processes affecting the redistribution of SOC in fields. However, few direct measurements have been made to investigate the dynamic process of SOC under intensive tillage in the field. Our objective was to test ...

To better understand the distribution of soil microbial communities at multiple spatial scales, a survey was conducted to examine the spatial organization of community structure in a wheat field in eastern Virginia (USA). Nearly 200 soil samples were collected at a variety of separation distances ranging from 2.5 cm to 11 m. Whole-community DNA was extracted from each sample, and community stru...

BACKGROUND In the early weeks of life, very low birth weight (VLBW) infants experience intense laboratory blood sampling leading to clinically significant anemia and the need for red blood cell transfusion. Although controversial, treatment with recombinant human erythropoietin (EPO) and iron has been recommended to stimulate erythropoiesis; optimal dosing of EPO and iron is still uncertain. ...

Understanding tree growth as a function of tree size is important for a multitude of ecological and management applications. Determining what limits growth is of central interest, and forest inventory permanent plots are an abundant source of long-term information but are highly complex. Observation error and multiple sources of shared variation (spatial plot effects, temporal repeated measures...

Information on the amount, distribution, and characteristics of coarse woody debris (CWD) in forest ecosystems is in high demand by wildlife biologists, fire specialists, and ecologists. In its important role in wildlife habitat, fuel loading, forest productivity, and carbon sequestration, CWD is an indicator of forest health. Because of this, the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research ...

Real-world phenomena are frequently modelled by Bayesian hierarchical models. The buildingblocks in such models are the distribution of each variable conditional on parent and/or neighbour variables in the graph. The specifications of centre and spread of these conditional distributions may be well-motivated, while the tail specifications are often left to convenience. However, the posterior di...

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Automatically understanding the plot of novels is important both for informing literary scholarship and applications such as summarization or recommendation. Various models have addressed this task, but their evaluation has remained largely intrinsic and qualitative. Here, we propose a principled and scalable framework leveraging expert-provided semantic tags (e.g., mystery, pirates) to evaluat...